The ways of the hour

by James Fenimore Cooper

We have related this conversation as the briefest mode of making the reader acquainted with the true state of things in and about the neat dwelling of Mrs. Updyke in Eighth-street. Much, however, remains to be told; as the morning of the very day which succeeded that on which the foregoing dialogue was held, was the one named for the wedding of the mistress of the house.

At the very early hour of six, the party met at the church door, one of the most gothic structures in the new quarter of the town; and five minutes sufficed to make the two one. Anna sobbed as she saw her mother passing away from her, as it then appeared to her; and the bride herself was a little overcome. As for McBrain, as his friend Dunscomb expressed it, in a description given to a brother bachelor, who met him at dinner—

“He stood fire like a veteran! You’re not going to frighten a fellow who has held forth the ring three times. You will remember that Ned has previously killed two wives, besides all the other folk he has slain; and I make no doubt the fellow’s confidence was a good deal increased by the knowledge he possesses that none of us are immortal—as husbands and wives, at least.”

But Tom Dunscomb’s pleasantries had no influence on his friend’s happiness. Odd as it may appear to some, this connection was one of a warm and very sincere attachment. Neither of the parties had reached the period of life when nature begins to yield to the pressure of time; and there was the reasonable prospect before them of their contributing largely to each other’s future happiness. The bride was dressed with great simplicity, but with a proper care; and she really justified the passion that McBrain insisted, in his conversations with Dunscomb, that he felt for her. Youthful, for her time of life, modest in demeanour and aspect, still attractive in person, the ‘Widow Updyke’ became Mrs. McBrain, with as charming an air of womanly feeling as might have been exhibited by one of less than half her age. Covered with blushes, she was handed by the bridegroom into his own carriage, which stood at the church-door, and the two proceeded to Timbully.

As for Anna Updyke, she went to pass a week in the country with Sarah Dunscomb; even a daughter being a little de trop, in a honey-moon. Rattletrap was the singular name Tom Dunscomb had given to his country-house. It was a small villa-like residence, on the banks of the Hudson, and within the island of Manhattan. Concealed in a wood, it was a famous place for a bachelor to hide his oddities in. Here Dunscomb concentrated all his out-of-the-way purchases, including ploughs that were never used, all sorts of farming utensils that were condemned to the same idleness, and such contrivances in the arts of fishing and shooting as struck his fancy; though the lawyer never handled a rod or levelled a fowling-piece. But Tom Dunscomb, though he professed to despise love, had fancies of his own. It gave him a certain degree of pleasure to seem to have these several tastes; and he threw away a good deal of money in purchasing these characteristic ornaments for Rattletrap. When Jack Wilmeter ventured, one day, to ask his uncle what pleasure he could find in collecting so many costly and perfectly useless articles, implements that had not the smallest apparent connection with his ordinary pursuits and profession, he got the following answer:—

“You are wrong, Jack, in supposing that these traps are useless[useless]. A lawyer has occasion for a vast deal of knowledge that he will never get out of his books. One should have the elements of all the sciences, and of most of the arts, in his mind, to make a thoroughly good advocate; for their application will become necessary on a thousand occasions, when Blackstone and Kent can be of no service. No, no; I prize my professions highly, and look upon Rattletrap as my Inn of Court.”

Jack Wilmeter had come over from Biberry to attend the wedding, and had now accompanied the party into the country, as it was called; though the place of Dunscomb was so near town that it was not difficult, when the wind was at the southward, to hear the fire-bell on the City Hall. The meeting between John Wilmeter and Anna Updyke had been fortunately a little relieved by the peculiar circumstances in which the latter was placed. The feeling she betrayed, the pallor of her cheek, and the nervousness of her deportment, might all, naturally enough, be imputed to the emotions of a daughter, who saw her own mother standing at the altar, by the side of one who was not her natural father. Let this be as it might, Anna had the advantage of the inferences which those around her made on these facts. The young people met first in the church, where there was no opportunity for any exchange of language or looks. Sarah took her friend away with her alone, on the road to Rattletrap, immediately after the ceremony, in order to allow Anna’s spirits and manner to become composed, without being subjected to unpleasant observation. Dunscomb and his nephew drove out in a light vehicle of the latter’s; and Michael Millington appeared later at the villa, bringing with him to dinner, Timms, who came on business connected with the approaching trial.

There never had been any love-making, in the direct meaning of the term, between John Wilmeter and Anna Updyke. They had known each other so long and so intimately, that both regarded the feeling of kindness that each knew subsisted, as a mere fraternal sort of affection. “Jack is Sarah’s brother,” thought Anna, when she permitted herself to reason on the subject at all; “and it is natural that I should have more friendship for him than for any other young man.” “Anna is Sarah’s most intimate friend,” thought Jack, “and that is the long and short of my attachment for her. Take away Sarah, and Anna would be nothing to me; though she is so pretty, and clever, and gentle, and lady-like. I must like those Anna likes, or it might make us both unhappy.” This was the reasoning of nineteen, and when Anna Updyke was just budding into young womanhood; at a later day, habit had got to be so much in the ascendant, that neither of the young people thought much on the subject at all. The preference was strong in each—so strong, indeed, as to hover over the confines of passion, and quite near to its vortex; though the long accustomed feeling prevented either from entering into its analysis. The attachments that grow up with our daily associations, and get to be so interwoven with our most familiar thoughts, seldom carry away those who submit to them, in the whirlwind of passion; which are much more apt to attend sudden and impulsive love. Cases do certainly occur in which the parties have long known each other, and have lived on for years in a dull appreciation of mutual merit—sometimes with prejudices and alienation active between them; when suddenly all is changed, and the scene that was lately so tranquil and tame becomes tumultuous and glowing, and life assumes a new charm, as the profound emotions of passion chase away its dulness; substituting hope, and fears, and lively wishes, and soul-felt impressions in its stead. This is not usual in the course of the most wayward of all our impulses; but it does occasionally happen, brightening existence with a glow that might well be termed divine, were the colours bestowed derived from a love of the Creator, in lieu of that of one of his creatures. In these sudden awakenings of dormant feelings, some chord of mutual sympathy, some deep-rooted affinity is aroused, carrying away their possessors in a torrent of the feelings. Occasionally, wherever the affinity is active, the impulse natural and strongly sympathetic, these sudden and seemingly wayward attachments are the most indelible, colouring the whole of the remainder of life; but oftener do they take the character of mere impulse, rather than that of deeper sentiment, and disappear, as they were first seen, in some sudden glow of the horizon of the affections.

In this brief analysis of some of the workings of the heart, we may find a clue to the actual frame of mind in which John Wilmeter returned from Biberry, where he had now been, like a sentinel on post, for several weeks, in vigilant watchfulness over the interests of Mary Monson. During all that time, however, he had not once been admitted within the legal limits of the prison; holding his brief, but rather numerous conferences with his client, at the little grate in the massive door that separated the gaol from the dwelling of the sheriff. Kind-hearted Mrs. Gott would have admitted him to the gallery, whenever he chose to ask that favour; but this act of courtesy had been forbidden by Mary Monson herself. Timms she did receive, and she conferred with him in private on more than one occasion, manifesting great earnestness in the consultations that preceded the approaching trial. But John Wilmeter she would receive only at the grate, like a nun in a well-regulated convent. Even this coyness contributed to feed the fire that had been so suddenly lighted in the young man’s heart, on which the strangeness of the prisoner’s situation, her personal attractions, her manners, and all the other known peculiarities of person, history, education and deportment, had united to produce a most lively impression, however fleeting it was to prove in the end.

Had there been any direct communications on the subject of the attachment that had so long, so slowly, but so surely been taking root in the hearts of John and Anna, any reciprocity in open confidence, this unlooked-for impulse in a new direction could not have overtaken the young man. He did not know how profound was the interest that Anna took in him; nor, for that matter, was she aware of it herself, until Michael Millington brought the unpleasant tidings of the manner in which his friend seemed to be entranced with his uncle’s client at Biberry. Then, indeed, Anna was made to feel that surest attendant of the liveliest love, a pang of jealousy; and, for the first time in her young and innocent life, she became aware of the real nature of her sentiments in behalf of John Wilmeter. On the other hand, drawn aside from the ordinary course of his affections by sudden, impulsive, and exciting novelties, John was fast submitting to the influence of the charms of the fair stranger, as has been more than once intimated in our opening pages, as the newly-fallen snow melts under the rays of a noon-day sun.